


for the first time in years

by akaparalian



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, wangst or something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:25:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has been forgiven, but he will not forgive. Spoilers for 2x15, “War”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for the first time in years

**Author's Note:**

> I’m really sorry guys. I’m pretty sure I’ve hit my limit when it comes to stupid wangsty hc fic, but WHO’S GONNA STOP ME?! HUH????  
> Soundtrack: Radioactive - Imagine Dragons, Lonely Boy - The Black Keys, A Lack of Color - Death Cab for Cutie

He has been forgiven, but he will not forgive.

They have moved past things, labelled betrayal and destruction with useless terms like Mind Control and Unaware and Innocent. They have put those things in boxes and packed them far away and forgiven and that is how things go in their line of work, more or less, but he will not forgive. They laughingly tell him that it happens to everyone eventually, or they hug him, or they just solemnly stare, and at first he feels their mistrust lingering in a way that feels masochistically good, but after a few weeks that dissipates and they _forgive_.

He doesn’t understand it. His choices so nearly lead to the end of everything and everyone- and yet they forgive. All of them, everyone, they all forgive. They slide the blame away from him, when clearly it is just as much his fault as the fault of anyone they’ve labelled as a perpetrator. They forgive, and so he will not forgive. Someone must recognize his guilt, even if that someone is him and him alone. He will carry this guilt, this fatigue, with him and long as he possibly can, as long as he is conscious of himself and his failures.

He will not forgive.

\---

Long ago, Bart forgave.

It wasn’t a conscious act, but at some point he looked at the color blue and he didn’t see Blue Beetle the captor, the keeper, the warden, he saw Jaime - his Jaime, his dearest friend in the vividly colorful past. He forgave the future actions because he knew, somehow, that they were not at all the actions of the same person. Nothing, Bart was certain, could so wholly change a person, unless it were the action of someone else, someone already far fouler. So Bart forgave, but Bart also _watched_.

And when it happened, everything snapped into place and he suddenly _knew_ \- the extra Beetle, that was it; he was the missing link, the stepping stone between sweet exasperated innocent Jaime and the Blue Beetle, the terror. He knew knew knew but he couldn’t tell anyone, couldn’t bring himself to say a damned thing, because there was only one way out of this situation and if one of them was going to go (die, succumb, perish) it was going to be him, because he was selfish enough to put his own feelings over possibly the entire world and barely even care.

Bart forgave without thinking - when the time came and the last trace of Jaime disappeared into the coldsmile voice he knew, had known, would know, he forgave even as he ignored his one last chance to make the right choice and be the better man. Selfish selfish selfish but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care; in the time before he came to he lived a thousand years with a thousand happy endings. But then he woke up and he knew again and in the act of knowing, he forgave.

\---

They get him back. He tries to tell them that he was never gone, that he lived every moment of it, but it makes them feel better to think M’gann awoke him from some deep sleep when she clawed the silky Green voice out of his skull, so he doesn’t argue too hard. Just remembering is enough - the memories of everything he said and did will not let him forget, and above all they will not let him forgive.

He takes a distinct pleasure in this: he is back at Mount Justice, sifting through the rubble that had lain mostly untouched for months while everyone dealt with more immediate problems. This, he knows, isn’t his fault - but it somehow helps, makes him feel as though he’s making some sort of amends. Others come by from time to time - he might catch dark skin or long blonde hair from the corner of his eye - but, largely, when he is here he is alone, free to sort through the unsalvaged remnants of what had once seemed like a home away from home, or perhaps the coolest clubhouse in the known universe. Now it just seems like a lot of rock and dust and monotony. The monotony is good. The monotony, too, has a perfect memory.

The occasional breaks in the monotony, though, bring back a different sort of memory. They’re silly, minor things - the wrapper of some utterly unhealthy snack, the case of a DVD he distinctly remembers from movie night, the spare gray hoodie that had long ago been stolen from his closet without that much complaint. (That one, of course, he jealously takes back from the wreckage and takes home and keeps beside his bed, hidden and unwashed.) Remembering anything other than his guilt feels wrong, only adds to that guilt, but he can’t help it - he’s selfishly glad to remember those precious few days before everything went to hell with him as its escort. He admires the memories of movie nights and stolen goods whenever they come, then hastily shoves them down and covers them with dust and smoke. He will not forgive, will not forgive, will not forgive.

He angrily tosses aside a now-useless hunk of rock, which lands with a far-off _thunk_ some ways from where he stands. This, too, is his fault - his anger, his raw feeling. He should be able to handle this, other handle this - he knows for a fact, now, that Nightwing had handled almost exactly this for much longer than he has - but he can’t, not calmly or silently. He’s almost given up, saving the noise and anger for when he’s here and unwatched and making do with the rest. He deals with it. Not well, he’s certain, but he can’t just forget, much less forgive. He’s sure that, in time, the anger will dissipate, leaving only the guilt and the determination - the _useful_ side effects. He’ll hold out in silence until this is gone and then, when he’s focused his guilt into a lance that he’s already seen, time and time again, in use by the others in this way of life, he’ll - find the team again, in a way he has yet to find them, despite their physical proximity, or he’ll go solo, or he’ll do... _something_. He has to be useful as something other than a guilty memory storage bank.

He doesn’t see the split-second blur of ginger-brown and pale skin and blue that disappears instantly from behind him when he moves to turn around. He’s more intent on his work than that, as he places the chunks of rubble into stacks, trying to bring them into some semblance of order. His real goal, though, is to find anything of importance that might have been lost in the blast and is not yet recovered - he knows the team came back and tried to find really important items, with a relatively high success rate, but he also knows that, especially in the case of those who lived here, there’s a lot still missing. Like that stupid hoodie, though maybe he should have left that. Maybe he doesn’t deserve it, maybe someone else still wants it.

_It doesn’t matter,_ he thinks, shaking himself back to his work. It’s not like he’ll forget, even it it’s at home and not here with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam.

He keeps working for hours, half-heartedly checking his watch every now and again to ensure that he doesn’t get home too late and worry his parents any more than he already has. They’re scared, they’ve been scared for months now, wondering about the sudden change, the sudden... stiffness in their son’s personality, and his mood swings and his spates of disappearance and everything else. He knows these things, and he truly hates that, too, but he can’t do anything about it now, because if he does, if he falls back into El Paso and Jaime Reyes and everything that he was before Blue Beetle, he knows - he knows - that he will start to forget. Slowly, maybe, but - he can’t take that risk.

He sighs and tosses a chunk of stone formerly known as part of the cave wall to his left with perhaps more than the necessary amount of force. “Stop pitying yourself,” he hisses to himself, and then he gets back to work, because that’s easier than thinking.

\---

_“Stop pitying yourself.”_

Bart almost _wilts._ He’s relatively certain that he heard that right - he’s so far away, though, and it was just the slightest of sounds. Still. He can feel Jaime thinking that sometimes, and that’s enough. Bad enough. Lonely enough. _Sad_ (melancholy, despondent, morose) enough. Maybe Jaime doesn’t pity himself, but Bart-

Well, is it pity? No. But he- empathizes? He blames himself for a lot of things, so he understands that, and, he thinks drily, he’s relatively used to blaming Jaime, so he understands that pretty damn well too. But then again, he doesn’t - for all he says to himself about empathy, he has no idea what to say to Jaime, how to even begin a conversation.

So he’s been - not _avoiding_ him, technically, just - not being open about being as close to him as possible as often as possible? That sounds a little better than “following him around without his knowledge”.

...a very little.

But whatever. It doesn’t matter, Bart thinks, sitting down and leaning against the table-looking pile of rubble he’s hiding behind, just barely within earshot of Jaime - or rather, of the dull, repeated _thud_ of Jaime punishing himself for being put under mind control by a hostile alien force by sifting through the debris that used to be his second home, searching for the remnant of his and his friends’ lives there. Bart sighs quietly, closing his eyes and leaning his head against his knees knees. What _can_ he say, what could he _possibly_ say? He understands, sort of, numbing, leaden depression - he’s felt it at the hands of Jaime himself, in fact, but he knows nothing nobody said to him had ever helped, except for maybe that time Nathaniel offered his assistance in sending Bart back in time to save his grandfather’s life and thereby ‘fix’ the present. But he can’t exactly offer that to Jaime, and he’s not sure he would even if he could. It didn’t exactly end terribly well the first time-

“Really?”

Crap. 

He startles and looks up and, of course, it’s Jaime - who else would it be? - and he looks- irritated, sort of. More than anything he looks vaguely flat, and tired.

“Did you seriously follow me here and then hide behind a rock and - what - sit and sigh? Dude. What the hell?”

“It’s not like that,” Bart says hastily as he stands, a dry, nervous laugh punctuating his defense as he looks down and away. 

“Then what is it?” Jaime says testily. “You just happened to find your way here and sit down behind a rock thirty feet away from me?”

“Well, I mean-”

“No, you know what, it doesn’t matter,” Jaime interrupts, then sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “It’s late, anyway. Just-” He pauses and just _looks_ at Bart, and Bart almost shivers. It’s the weirdest sort of deja vu, but it’s like looking into a mirror at himself from his present - his _original_ present, he corrects himself absentmindedly; this is his present now- right down to the dully determined look in his eyes. No one should have that expression. He came back to the past so that no one would ever have to have that expression, dammit. “Just go home, Bart.”

“I am home,” he blurts before he can stop himself, then winces minutely and takes a nervous half-step backwards. Oh, _God_ , he thinks.

Jaime narrows his eyes. “I thought you were living with Barry and Iris now. You- you’re not saying you’ve been living _here?_ ”

“No, no,” Bart says, waving his hands in earnest denial. “That’s not what I meant. Never mind. I’ll just-” gogogogogo I can’t _stand_ this-

“What did you mean, then?” Jaime says more slowly, intrigued obviously despite himself. He looks down and Bart freezes. He could lie. He could, but he - he doesn’t want to. Not anymore. He’s tired of lying. Impulse was a lie, really, and he lived in that lie and he’s _still_ living in it and he’s tired of it, he’s tired of lying.

“I just meant that, uh, that you were here,” he says quickly, looking anywhere but at Jaime. “‘Cause I mean, it’s kinda twisted but you’re basically the reason I’m here (well partly) and you still pretty much are except now it’s different, but it’s still you. And. Um. You haven’t - you’re obviously not - I’m really sorry,” he finishes, his heart racing like a rabbit’s and the strangest part is - he’s scared, yeah, of putting himself out there like this, but more than that he’s elated. He hated lying, and now he can stop.

They stand in silence for a heavy moment, the removed rush of the ocean doing nothing to soothe either of them. Finally, Jaime kicks at the ground aimlessly, sending pebbles skittering into Bart’s sneakers.

“Well,” he says, and something’s clearly different about his voice - he’s not... happier, per se, but he obviously understood at least part of what Bart was trying to convey; he sounds lighter, somehow. Just a little, but it’s there. “I’m not sure what you’re apologizing for, but I’m... sorry, too. Obviously. For everything.” He scrubs a hand through his hair and sighs. “And, uh. I’ve missed you, too.”

“It’s probably kind of inappropriate, given the context of everything they’ve just said, but Bart breaks into the hugest grin and, unable to contain himself, leaps forward and envelops Jaime in a hug, which he returns a split second later with a tense ferocity. And if there are maybe tears pricking at Bart’s eyes - and Jaime’s, too, not that he’d admit it - well, no one’s there to judge them for it.

“Good to have you back, hermano,” Bart whispers, and Jaime just laughs.


End file.
